Sunday, December 11, 2011

Hardware store giant Lowe’s has yanked ads from the series after the Florida Family Association encouraged members to email the program’s advertisers.

I didn't really know anything about the show "All-American Muslim," so I wondered what the controversy was. According to the TLC website:

All-American Muslim takes a look at life in Dearborn, Michigan--home to the largest mosque in the United States--through the lens of five Muslim American families.
Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.

Sounds pretty innocuous. Turns out that was the objection. The Florida Family Association objected to the fact that the Muslims in the show were being shown living their dull, ordinary lives, not scheming and plotting to kill anyone.

“The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish,” the group said

You're basically complaining that the show is NOT racist!

“Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show.”

So, let's say you're Lowe's. And you get a letter from a bunch of psycho assholes complaining that the show you sponsor is not using negative stereotypes in its portrayal of Muslims. These lunatics object to the fact that the show does not lump all Muslims in together as terrorists and murderers. How would you respond to such a letter? You, being a normal person, would probably either toss the letter in the trash and go about your day as if you had never seen it, or respond to these dicks with something along the lines of "screw off, you racist troglodytes." But that's because you're a normal person.

What Lowe's actually did was to pull their ads from a perfectly benign television show in order to placate the loonies.
You can't really blame the loonies. They are, after all, loonies. But presumably the marketing department at Lowe's is composed largely of sane persons. And they weighed the pros and cons and decided to knuckle under to the bigots. They made a conscious decision to let the bigots win. And that is to their eternal shame.